Whiteness reading resources

Hey guys, so I told Zoe about this but since it came up a lot in class today I thought everyone might find these things helpful/interesting too... I've been following this girl's blog for awhile and she has a wealth of  knowledge of everything that is wrong with society on terms of racism, and as white people a lot of us don't see it. None of us would probably call ourselves racist, but it's good to read up on how much mentality most people in america have towards white privilege and think about how you  can respond to remedy that attitude. I have never really been aware of a lot of the things that she brings up, and even though sometimes I feel defensive or don't always agree when reading about it, it really is disgusting how many of these things are ignored! (And when she talks about it she covers white attitude toward every race- asian, hispanic, etc. and also about how culture appropriating is inappropriate.)

http://super-eklectic1.tumblr.com/whiteness

http://super-eklectic1.tumblr.com/post/32216116252/reactions-to
http://super-eklectic1.tumblr.com/post/20369474743/racism-what-does-it-mean

Her blog isn't strictly about this, it's just something she's passionate about and posts about a lot, but she answers questions from her followers sometimes that are really helpful too.

Triptych

 

This proved to be a lot harder for me than I originally thought it would be. I really struggled when it came down to the time to actually apply the practice that I was going to use.  This project is going to move slower than my other usually do and the journey is probably not going to yield as successful results but I have become invested in it so I'm going to continue.

~('_')~Triptych~('_')~

I've been doing a lot of thinking and thinking about thinking and the likes of that, and it has both benefitted and disrupted my progress in depicting my concept through my photography. Basically, it's given me a ton of new ideas, some of which I don't know where to go with, but it's also gotten me caught up in maintaining certain aspects that may in fact, not be necessary. I don't know how happy I am with this series.

We trippy mayne.

Bunnyman Bridge

Bunnyman Bridge, a.k.a. Fairfax County Bridge, Clifton, VA

*Triptych*

My Concept so far... in a Triptych.

Each image is from a different person's shoot.

I revised my concept, switching from photographing strangers (I felt I was going nowhere with that idea) to photographing items carried around daily of people I know. I am still figuring out how to photograph the belongings; two possible ways were practised in these images.

triptych practice

This is an entirely new way of looking for me. Ever since I was a kid, I have coped with anxiety through organisation but have never wanted to document it because it's my private way of dealing. I wanted to explore how [my sexual/gender identity and] I relate to my family through the cataloguing of things I associate with them. First, the two sides of my family take two extremes on the stance of discipline. For one side, it is to be beaten in--a tradition unchanged--and for the other, it is to be taught through strict moral guidance--no teacher like Catholic Guilt. For the second, titled "Rachel," I put together all of the objects that created my adolescent identity: "Rachel." That girl doesn't exist, and I constructed this persona for the sake of my family, but I have nothing natural in common with her. The third is an invitation to my stepfather's memorial service. I had to miss it because I was at school and had no chance to ever introduce him to "Shanaz." I regret not telling him all the time.

Quite frankly, I don't know how photographically comfortable I am doing this, but I thought there was no better time to take a chance on something new.

Triptych

So I consider this to be more of a rough draft for further photographs. I plan on exploring the relationship I have with my dad, and how it's become growingly uncomfortable. Unfortunately he  was out of town the weekend I came home to do this shoot. In the future I plan on spending a significant length of time alone together and document what happens when we run out of things to say.

Triptych

me exploring my inner child experience by making art with found objects lying around in alleys

Triptych

Working together on these pictures was the smoothest experience yet, and the only one so far that makes me feel like doing this series is proving helpful. We figured out a system, if I clean her room then she is willing to make pictures with me. It's all about push and pull, we didn't fight at all and we both helped each other out with something.

Triptych

For this assignment I am still working within the idea of insecurities and the covering or masking of them.  I chose to use wax as a way of covering my models insecurity that she tries to avoid.

Hoarding on the Move: Richmond (House #3)

My family doesn't just own one house, but three, along with two RVs, one we use, and a retired one. Each of these units show major traits of hoarding. I am having difficulty gaining access to the mother house in Arlington, the one I was born and raised in, due to not ever having been issued a key. I am no longer welcome inside. Therefore, I didn't get to do a triptych of that house. I am not yet ready to give up getting access to it, though. But here's what I've got for this quick assignment.

Insecurities and Embarrassments: A Triptych

For this, I asked my models (and...myself) to draw on an outline of the human body representations of their insecurities and things that they are embarrassed of. I didn't give any limitations as to what they were or were not allowed to draw or write. These really need to be larger prints, which is how I plan to present them if I continue this.

 

Mark Hogancamp: Marwencol

About Mark Hogancamp and Marwencol: "After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark builds a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populates the town he dubs 'Marwencol' with dolls representing his friends and family and creates life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helps Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds of the attack. When Mark and his photographs are discovered, a prestigious New York gallery sets up an art show. Suddenly Mark's homemade therapy is deemed 'art', forcing him to choose between the safety of his fantasy life in Marwencol and the real world that he's avoided since the attack."

I just find these fascinating, and thought you guys might, too. His gallery is in the form of blog posts, seeming to document daily "life" in his made-up town. Also, take note that one of the dolls is himself. These are just a few examples of the posts. Enjoy!

Concept

Currently, I am considering working on 2 different projects. My first is a series of photos based around my experiences with Max and his Mother at an Asian Antique store by the name of 3 swallows. I've felt inclined to frequent the store and it’s owner due to the rich yet humble visual atmosphere. Since I’ve started visiting, my relationship with both of them as well as the artifacts has become more personal thus allowing me to exemplify that in my photographs. The loose theme of dislocation is applied to my work being that I’m observing that cultural effects of canadian born Max living in Virginia with copious amounts of asian history surrounding him.
  The second project I am thinking of pursing is the concept of unemployment and perpetual workers. By placing myself in a workspace for anywhere between 2 hours and a full day I am going to try to get a feel for what it is like to begin to familiarize myself with a job and have to let it go. My challenge will lie in trying to find establishments that will let me service them for a day, in which I will not ask for any sort of compensation. The occupations that I will try to reach out to are all low-wage / manual labor businesses. I will be photographed in a 35mm snapshot fashion by another employee throughout my time working.

Concepts

    For the past couple of weeks I've been showing pictures of children and how I like to photograph them in a different kind of way. I like to use them as subjects to portray ideas that don't necessarily relate to a child. I just feel as though it makes the viewer think a little harder about what might be going on.  Children also naturally add a sense of innocence whenever they are photographed, I think it's fun and interesting to try and strip that innocence away in a single photo.
    I've also been working on something else on the side which is photographing peoples hands and things they hold. I think the way people hold things can tell a lot about what they're doing. Right now I'm too interested in both to just pick one direction. I've thought about combining them but I don't want to limit things people hold to just children. Our hands touch and hold so many things during the day, and we don't even realize. Sometimes we pick up one thing and put it back down not recognizing that we may never hold that item ever again. Things like that are interesting to me.

An Evaluation on Concept.

            Starting out this semester, I became very intent on pursuing the act of covering my model’s faces with masks and other means in order to hide their facial identity. Then, I became caught up in the idea of ‘self identity’ and what it meant to use only myself as my subject. Throughout my own thought process, the input of my peers, and the progression of shooting, I’ve gone through using strictly myself as my subject, to incorporating various objects, settings, and people that I did not consider before. I’ve come to realize that what I’m really aiming for is not the masking of myself and my identity, but the raw, uncomfortable feeling that develops inside the from the sight of an unidentifiable person in an eerie and unsettling scenario. After my initial presentation where my peers made me aware of just how powerful my identity is to me, my concept solidified into the disruption of physical identity through various means. Since my most recent shoot under this concept, I think tableau settings are really beneficial to my growing concept, as they not only intrigue the viewer, but also keep my mind working, thinking, and excited about all the stories I can create. ‘Empathy’ is a key word I have and will continue to reflect on and incorporate into my concept. Ultimately, as it stands, my concept is both developing and unraveling around the creation of eerie, uncomfortable, tableau scenes where the incorporation of meddling with the subject’s identity is absolutely necessary. Then again, it is also safe to say that my concept will continue growing and progressing, and where my concept stands now, may not be where it stands a week from now. 

Concept as of late

I have been thinking about urban legends and local myths. I am very interested in how these legends help shape the social culture of a region. For example, my hometown of West Milford in NJ is very well known in the tri-state area for its rich history of urban legends. Clinton Road and its history of witchcraft, satanist and KKK meetings, and for being the place where victims of the Mob hitman "The Iceman" were ditched. I have been influenced by my fear of these places. My over active imagination has plagued me since I was young. I hope to try and exorcise this fear of empty spaces where activity once happened. I have changed my direction a bit since coming across a quote from Nabil Elderkin: "If you're only making art about your own pedestrian life, abstracted from the reality of the world today, soon you'll have a creative cesspool of meaningless work. Because it's not built on any values." I look to find value in this work through the research of community and the creation myth.

Current concept manifesto

     At the moment, I am exploring the dysfunction and uneasiness that exists in the relationship between my sister and me. Using photography as the medium of common ground, it constrains us to come together and work on creating something, almost like an unwilling collaboration. This has been successful so far on more of a behind the scenes level, as it forces us to examine the way we treat each other while working on resolving present issues. It is almost like the process becomes more important than the final outcome.
     It is my hope that through this series, my sister and I will gain more understanding of each other as our familial bond is shown on a visual level. My sister is one of my most photographed subjects, however I have never appeared in the images with her, and it changes the dynamic completely because the photo no longer becomes about how I view her, but how we view each other. As we are non-biologically related, we both come to our relationship with different baggage and history. I don’t view this project as a cure by any means, but I hope that as I continue with photographing us together, the photographs will start to change over time from dysfunction to displaying more comfortableness, as things have not always been this way between us.

Current Standing

In my current standing, I am working with the idea of hanging onto a memory that I never experienced, and trying to explore this memory through a life I have already lived and known. My mother was born in 1960 in El Salvador, and by the time she was about 11 years old, a civil war had broken out, with the biggest, most traumatic events occurring in the early 1980s. At an even younger age, when she was seven, she and her family (which by this point was broken up due to divorce and reluctance of ownership by her parents) experienced an incredible earthquake, which left them homeless for a time (I am not sure how long of a duration this was). Upon living through a bloody civil war, one of question of authority, natural disasters, and rocky upbringing between intermediate family and relatives, my mother developed several psychological problems. For one, she is a hoarder, and I grew up in a hoarding household, where stepping over piles of who-knows-what, keeping things for “self-defense” or “might come in useful later” or was free, was the norm. Over the years, the problem has gotten worse, and I have totally detached myself from my home back in Arlington.
    Through photographs, I hope to obtain both a documentation of objects/belongings that my mother brought with her from El Salvador, and upon visiting my house in Arlington (which will be a struggle to get to, on account I do not have keys, never have, never will), I hope to document the disaster that has followed me throughout these years, but the piles upon piles never hitting me as fully abnormal. I was always ashamed of never being able to invite anybody over or the oppressive hierarchy that my mother had over us, letting her continue her hoarding, to never question it. She even conned our own father into it. Yet, although hoarding is the problem, I almost want to show some sort of godly quality to it. Her idea of hoarding is not like what people see on Hoarders. Hers comes from a line of mishaps in her life. I want to acknowledge this relation between Salvadoran belongings that we own, in juxtaposition to the state that our life is in. And although this is a tough matter, I need to show my mom some respect and some credit.

Concept as of now

My concept right now is the exploration of the things people tend to keep to themselves that make them feel alienated, out of place, or embarrassed. It used to be 'secrets', but I realised that these things aren't always necessarily secrets. They're usually thing(s) that the person doesn't adamantly keep a secret, but tends not to talk about. That, or they are things that the person tries to avoid actually talking about or explaining. So far, I have only explored this concept with one model. My subconscious reasoning behind that is that I think a certain amount of time needs to be spent talking with someone and getting to know them before I can actually get as deep as I need to. Sure, if you ask a stranger to tell you a secret, they might, but it won't be as detailed or as embarrassing as something that someone you really talk to a lot will end up telling you. It is also important to note that the model I have been using has been through a lot of things that I've not heard from anyone his age. Anyway, my concept is generally secrets, or embarrassing things that people keep to themselves. I am having a hard time figuring out how to depict this photographically.

~~~^_^~~~Appropriations~~~^_^~~~

The image I decided to appropriate my photography with is another version of a similar photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino that I have appropriated off before. Ultimately, my desire was to appropriate nearly every element from Mondino's photograph into mine, while simultaneously inserting my concept. I feel that for the most part, I was able to fulfill that thanks to the insertion of curtains, the simplicity of the background, and a similar perspective. I wanted to stay consistent with my concept, and incorporate panty hose into this image as I did before. The most challenging aspect to appropriate from Mondino's photograph is the lighting. Without exact elements replicated into my image, grasping Mondino's gradient from red/orange to a sour yellow/greenish proved to be most difficult. While working off of Mondino's shots that incorporate this male model, I have become fascinated with the way the artist is capable of creating such a creepy and unsettling mood based off of his model's subtle actions.

Single Appropriation

Gueorgui Pinkhassov’s photo of a fish market in Indonesia portrayed a bodily bilingual atmosphere in which all animate subjects seemed to benefit from each other. I had spent a good amount of my visits to 3 swallows observing the position of artifacts as well as the projection of natural light. Although Pinkhassov’s composition resembles a symbiosis between the people, I wanted to focus on the dislocation of the artifacts. I feel that he doesn’t quite understand or acknowledge his profound connection to having a mother who preserves and sells asian antiques.

Dominion

Jonas Bendikson is a Norwegian photojournalist for Magnum. His image on the right is of a boy in China walking through the snow on a dark, gray winter day. He appears lost or out of place, like he doesn't belong in his environment or even in the frame of the photo. The boy is the focus of the viewer's attention. I notice the tonal contrast between the neutral gray landscape and the dark solitary figure of the boy in the center of the image. The silhouette of the boy is therefore quite distinct, contributing to the sense of detachment of his figure to his own environment.

I appropriated Bendikson's photo here, not borrowing the content so much as the color scheme, composition, and his use of contrast and space to create a division, or a sense of separatness within a single image.

I don't own a bible and haven't been raised learning from it (or any religious text, customs, practices, etc.). I'm going to buy one and read some of it for this project, and because I've been telling myself I would for a long time. Until I do, I just googled passages about the idea of "dominion" which led me to this passage Romans 6:14. "For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace."

I think the passage can serve almost as a caption for my photo on the left as well as an arrow to another possible direction in which I can explore the idea of dominion.

V2

I chose Alec Soth to appropriate. As of late I have been very interested in his Broken Manual series, about a select group of people who actively removed themselves from society and relocated to the woods. It resonates a bit with my concept. The people in Broken Manual have made themselves a myth or urban legend to the society that they left behind by uprooting everything and moving. In this photo I have attempted to appropriate Soth's flourishing foliage with a flat black and white aesthetic, with the subject centered. I do not yet know if I want to include humans in my photos yet. That, to me, is the glaring difference between these photos. Our photos are opposite in one interesting way: My photo is of an inanimate object surrounded by life, while Soth's image is a living being surrounded by inanimate objects. Just an observation that likely means nothing.

Andreea Anghel

I've always loved Andreea Anghel's work, this photo especially because it's so soft and simple. I started with two separate ideas this semester which were shooting children without all the smiles and laughter, and shooting peoples hands and the things they hold. So I just decided to do both and see where it leads and mixed the two for this photograph.


Her Website ---> http://cigaro.carbonmade.com/

Trish Morrissey Appropriation

I chose to do this appropriation on Trish Morrissey's image because the subject matter between our two projects is very similar. I came across Morrissey while flipping through the Charlotte Cotton book and immediately knew I wanted to appropriate the image featured on the pages. Her project, 7 Years, dealt with documenting the uneasy familial bonds between her and her sister, while using photography as a bridge of communication between them. Coincidentally, the gap between me and my sister is also 7 years. Her images are mostly very contrived in costumey clothing to replicate fictional family snapshots, but it was the image of her and her sister against the low wall that stood out to me. While it the photo was staged, it still has an effect of honesty. There is tension in the body language of the standing subject, and apathy in the squatting subject. The subjects seemed to contrast between tomboy and feminine, young and older. Tense expressions on the squatting subject suggests discomfort, and the hand across the stomach suggests self consciousness. I almost chose a different location for this appropriation, but went with a wall since walls are dividers between two spaces, and Morrissey might have intentionally chose her spot for a similar reason. Taking this photo was again, really hard, since it is difficult for two people to collaborate if they can't agree on anything. Doing this project up to this point has made me realize how easy it is to blame the other person in the relationship for the problems, but the series has highlighted all of my shortcomings and more. I don't mind photographing the bad things, but my sister doesn't like this series very much and I don't know if I'll want to continue it for much longer since I don't want to give her another reason to resent me. It's a hard balance.

Thomas Czarnecki Appropriation

My concept is developing into a portrayal of deaths of females due to the stereotypes they are forced into. I remembered looking at Thomas Czarnecki's series "From Enchantment to Down" during one of our classes last year and felt that the concept and image execution would be a strong starting point for my concept/work so I looked through it again. I wanted my image to mimic the feeling you get from Thomas's work that the viewer just happened upon this scene. I aimed to keep the lighting minimal as he does and use the lighting direction to highlight specific areas and props in the scene. The combination of several elements in the overall scene is what creates an interaction and the model involvement is minimal.

more appropriation..

For this appropriation, I decided to based my photograph off Mitra Tabrizian's work. 

Tabrizian is a British-Iranian photographer and film director. I recently came across a mid career survey of hers called Beyond the Limits, and immediately got caught up in the way she combines techniques from documentary photography, report and advertising while using cinematic references to make the viewers aware of ideologies behind cultural identities. I focused on the blue and somewhat yellow tones often used in Tabrizian's work, to give a cooler, if not a slightly more dramatic look to my photograph. I tried to direct the light and guide the viewer's eye, suggest the presence of other protagonists, and add-on elements to emphasize the fictitious aspect of the work. 

Oh and PS: guess what peeps! Mitra Trabrizian does appropriations too!

Appropriation

Me vs. Lynsey Addario

When I chose this image I was immediately attracted to it's simplicity. As I studied it I began to pick out the key elements I needed to use in my appropriation. At first I picked out the area of bright light in the background, and a person sitting on a bed in the foreground. Next I tried to look closer at the person in Addario's photograph. She's alone on her bed fixing her hair wearing what I assumed are pajamas. With my model I tried having him run his hands through his hair but in all of those photographs he looked too comfortable. My concept is discomfort or the feeling of not belonging so I decided to try something different. The shoot was slightly uncomfortable and I don't think my model felt totally confident wearing so little clothes. This was the pose he kept returning to while I was adjusting my camera. I really like how he unconsciously covered himself with his left arm, and I think this does a lot for my discomfort concept. 

Appropriation of Frances Kearney

Frances's photo:
Overcast sky; child model; child doing something weird with forces? (can't find the context behind this); large/long area, skeletal structure, perhaps abandoned?; there's a bike; very small color palette... Frances Kearney's Five People Thinking The Same Thing first caught my eye, and I enjoyed his mysterious tableau images that were also featured on his website. They're interestingly telling, encouraging you to try to figure out what the child is doing, and why. Why are they playing in these spaces?
My appropriation is more a visual appropriation than conceptual. The skeletal structure reminds me so much of the Civil War Union prison on Belle Isle, so I'll have to trek over there again. The color palette should remain fairly simple, and I HAVE TO shoot on an overcast day. A flash may have to be used since the overcast day might not provide enough light under the structure. The model, like Kearney's model, will also do this odd moving-forces pose (the resulting image looked less like a messing-with-forces and more awkwardly-dancing pose). About the bike... boxes seem just as suggestive of a child playing as a bike could. The bike suggests the area was happened upon, the box seems more like the beginnings of a structure in this abandoned area.

Appropriation

Gabriel Orozco - (top image) We looked at him last week in class, and his work on merging "reality" and "art" together are very conceptually and aesthetically pleasing. For my concept I am trying to play with the idea of having that childlike experience and playing with my surroundings and see what I can create. It is mostly about that feeling I had when I was a kid playing in the sandbox. I would run around with my brothers and go on epic imaginary adventures. We would play in mud, build forts and dig through peoples trash.  It made me realize how much I miss being a kid. I really want to express the importance of "making a mark on the world" not just photographing what I see, but actually connecting with the moment. Lately, I noticed I have been doing that with my work by taking things lying around and being curious as to what I can make with what is given. So, I walked around through alleyways and whenever I found something interesting, abandoned, or not being used I would take it and find something else interesting near it and just make something or do something to put my mark/my signature on whatever it was. I would also leave it there and whoever was passing down the alley that day got a good look at what I was doing. With this photograph (bottom)I was walking and noticed how the dirt had all of these shoe prints from where people were walking and so i took a near by stick and made a line overtop. Gabriel expresses this through his photograph (top) by taking a bike and running it through a puddle to create a circle.

Artist Unknown.

This image requires some explanation:
On the right is the image of femininity I have been raised to portray. Calm, cool, collected, pretty. But I don't fit the photo on the right. I appropriated the warm colour cast, window lighting, and the position. However, I don't fit comfortably in this space because I am at odds with my surroundings: a feminine room with a masculine female. The model on the right is my mother, age 20. I took this not 24 hours after she, for the first time in my life, told me to change who I am and want to be for her comfort. I was told to grow my hair, wear a dress, act like a "normal" girl. I wanted to appropriate through opposition with my outfit (choosing myself as the model, essentially) and a more gendered [modern] room with "typical" female aspects (flowers, light curtains, floral print, pastel walls) instead of the neutral tans and browns on the right.

Appropriation

For my appropriation, I chose this image by Oleksandr Hnatenko because it seemed, to me, to already kind of fit my concept. I wanted to take the idea of hiding behind a mask and trying to make yourself seem happy to others, and apply it to my own concept. What I had written down when I found this photo was that I was pretty much going to replicate it exactly but have my model write something on the mask. Anything he thought of when he heard my idea (I knew it would point to some kind of deeper issue). That changed, though, when I found this notebook in his bag. What he had written on the front was fascinating to me, when combined with the fact that he constantly thinks he will never finish what he's writing. I gave him the notebook, gave him the mask, showed him the original photo, and told him to write what came to mind. I couldn't have anticipated for it to fit so perfectly, but it did. So, my appropriation is not direct, but changes had to be made so that it could actually fit my concept. I had to make this photo go to a deeper place than its original.

Just in case it can't be read at this size/resolution/whatever: The notebook says, "If this isn't finished, you have no reason to be bored or complain about your job, your income, or your LIFE." The mask says, "It will never be done."

Zhang Huan Appropriation

For this appropriation I focused on the covering or "masking" of my subject in a similar way to Zhang Huan.  I asked my subject to tell me one of her biggest insecurities, and to read from a book that she felt reflected her insecurity.  She felt more comfortable with displaying her insecurities through another language (Italian).  I appropriated the masking technique, similar outfit, and framing.
 Huan's style is very straight forward and is reflective of the individual, which is what I am most interested in appropriating.  The progression of the writing covering her face is directly taken from Huan's series.

Jeff Wall Appropriation

I decided to re-appropriate Jeff Wall, because the first time around, I felt like I didn’t make good enough of an effort for the likes of him. I am impressed by his use of appropriation of artwork from painters such as Velasquez and Manet, whom he references in several works, not just stylistically through characters, but also compositionally. I luckily came across a link to the page of his MoMa exhibition that he had back in 2007, full of commentaries on his work and everything. It was incredibly insightful and helped me wrap my head around what Jeff Wall goes through when making a photograph. Here’s the link:

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2007/jeffwall/

The pieces I find most compelling of his, especially upon reading his commentaries, are The Destroyed Room, Picture for Women,  and A Sudden Gust of Wind. However, by reading the commentaries about these pieces, I actually decided to go with his other piece that I’m fond of, Insomnia. By not even making a single effort to find a commentary about Insomnia, I was free to interpret the work on my own, with some guidance from his previous commentaries about the other work I am drawn to. The Destroyed Room is an appropriation of the painting Sardanapalus, which is a depiction of the psychological and emotional dominance that the Napoleon ruling provided. Wall was also inspired to re-create window shop displays, with the twist that the Punk movement had given to commercialism. In Picture for Women, Wall appropriates the painting The Bar by Manet. Wall interprets Manet’s painting of how men and women stand in society, in everyday life, especially at the peak of women’s influence in the art movement of the late 1970s. 

Through the commentaries of Wall on his own pieces, I decided to decipher Insomnia by myself. The photo is of a man on a kitchen floor. You don’t know whose kitchen floor it is. He looks to possibly be dazed or injured. He looks uncomfortable, but finds comfort from the floor. The overall colors of the photograph are greenish or sickley. They are sterile and cold. What enjoy about most of Wall’s photographs, is that he doesn’t give you dead away what he is imposing. With Insomnia, I wanted to create a tableau of myself, in relation to my concept of documentation of objects that tie me to El Salvador, even though I have never been. These objects are not made presented to be flashy, but rather calm and knowing. They are objects to provide comfort for the things that I have never seen or witnessed, but only that my mother has, about thirty years ago. I struggled with different photos, doing everything from photographing myself in the shower with my Salvadoran bathrobe on, to myself holding the cross through the window, to mimic Picture for Women, and then I decided to go outside and take it there. I tried different poses on the grass, and used different objects, but the less objects I used, I felt the stronger the work was. I decided to finally just lie in the grass with the translucent sheet covering me, like a corpse, holding a cross with folk art from La Palma over my body. I felt like it provided a sense of closure and comfort. Although I do not know much about my own mother’s past, having objects that were once hers and passed along to me give me a sort of attachment to something I never knew.

For Brian

This is a crappy looking website but the work is good and it definitely relates to the beginnings of your project. Mostly its just a massive body of work dedicated to this so called "ruin-porn" so there are hundreds of different venues he has visited that exhibit the same idea. Some serious consistency and commitment to this idea!

http://www.abandonedamerica.us/

Matthew Christopher

Updated Appropriations

Appropriations of 5 Artists

Annie Leibovitz

Alfred Eisenstaedt

David Hockney

Frances Kearney

Michael Muller

Appropriations in Relation to Concept

 Myriam Abdelaziz

 James Mollison

 Jeff Wall

Bahrat Sikka

Lauren E. Simonutti